Text Cleaner – Remove Formatting, Smart Quotes & Hidden Characters
Turn messy copied text into clean plain text: remove hidden and zero-width characters, convert smart quotes and long dashes, strip HTML tags and URLs, and reduce everything to plain ASCII when needed.
🔄 Font Styles – click Copy on any result
Clean text
Clean text: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Remove invisible characters
Remove invisible characters: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Straight quotes
Straight quotes: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Remove HTML tags
Remove HTML tags: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Remove URLs
Remove URLs: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Plain ASCII only
Plain ASCII only: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Clean + remove punctuation
Clean + remove punctuation: “Smart quotes” — an em dash… and ahidden character <b>plus HTML</b> https://example.com
Styled letters are Unicode characters, not fonts. Platform fields may reject some characters, and glyph appearance varies by device and app. Screen readers may announce styled letters individually and search engines may not match them to plain words, so test the result and keep essential details in plain text. Unicode accessibility guide
Text copied from Word, Google Docs, web pages and PDFs carries baggage you cannot see: curly “smart” quotes and apostrophes, em and en dashes, non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters used for tracking or formatting, byte-order marks, HTML tags and stray links. Pasted into code, a form, a CSV or a plain-text field these cause errors, broken searches and mysterious “invalid character” messages.
The Clean text row fixes the common problems at once: smart quotes become straight quotes, dashes become hyphens, ellipsis characters become three dots, invisible characters are deleted and whitespace is normalised. The other rows target one problem each, and “Plain ASCII only” goes furthest – accents removed, every non-ASCII character dropped – for systems that accept nothing else.
How to Use This Generator
- 1
Paste the text.
- 2
Copy “Clean text” for general use, or a specific row for one issue (HTML, URLs, invisible characters).
- 3
Use “Plain ASCII only” for code, legacy systems and strict form fields.
The Hidden Characters Explained
These are the characters most often responsible for text that “looks fine but doesn’t work”.
- Zero-width space (U+200B) and joiner (U+200D) – invisible, break search and passwords
- Non-breaking space (U+00A0) – looks like a space, is not treated as one by code
- Byte-order mark (U+FEFF) – appears at the start of files saved from some editors
- Soft hyphen (U+00AD) – invisible until a line wraps
- Smart quotes “ ” ‘ ’ and dashes – — – break code strings and CSV parsing
Cleaning Text for Code and Data
A single curly quote in a config file or a zero-width space in an API key can take an hour to find. Paste the suspect text here and compare the “Remove invisible characters” row with the original; if they differ, that was the problem. “Plain ASCII only” is the right choice for passwords, keys, usernames and anything a legacy system will store, since it leaves only printable ASCII characters and line breaks.
Stripping HTML and Links
“Remove HTML tags” turns copied page source or rich-text into readable text and decodes the basic entities (&amp; → &). “Remove URLs” deletes http(s) links and www addresses from a message or a transcript. Combine the rows – clean, then strip punctuation – to prepare text for analysis. The cleaning runs in your browser; analytics and other site data are described in the Privacy Policy.
Related Text Tools
Frequently Asked Questions
Will it remove accents?
Only the “Plain ASCII only” row does. “Clean text” keeps accented letters and other alphabets.
How do I know if my text has invisible characters?
Paste it and compare the “Remove invisible characters” row with the original – if the row is shorter, hidden characters were present.
Does it remove formatting like bold?
Pasting into the box already drops rich formatting; the HTML row removes tags if you pasted source code.
Is it safe to paste passwords or keys?
Do not paste passwords, access keys or other secrets into a web tool. This cleaner processes text in your browser, but the site also loads analytics and advertising services; see the Privacy Policy for details.
Is the text cleaner free?
Yes.
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